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Tea Party Dead, But Its Ghosts Still Haunt DC

“The Tea Party movement is dead. It’s gone,” according to a Tea Party leader quoted on the Daily Beast. With the Tea Party unable to coalesce around a presidential candidate, they seem to have lost the tremendous influence they exerted in the 2010 midterm elections. Yet, we still see Congressional Republicans trying to win them over with bill after bill to “drill, baby, drill.”

In their first year controlling Congress in 2011, the Tea Party voted 191 times to weaken environmental protections.

And while the movement’s own leaders are now lamenting its decline, House Republicans haven’t gotten the message. The ghosts of the Tea Party are still setting the agenda in Congress. A drilling bill is now masquerading as a transportation bill. The leaders of the Energy Committee are trying to prevent limits on carbon pollution. And the GOP is pushing to force through the Keystone XL pipeline.

With the Tea Party on the wane, now is the time to bury their bad ideas, too. Let’s say goodbye to the Tea Party and the dirty energy billionaires who bankrolled their movement. Let’s lay to rest the dirty air and dirty energy policies they promoted. Congress must stop bowing to the ghosts of the Tea Party.